Developing a rhizomatic methodology Dr Eileen Honan The University of Queensland e.honan@uq.edu.au
Session Overview • Overview of the research project • Overview of rhizomatic methodologies • Applying rhizotextual analytic techniques to data
Project aims • Investigate the teaching of digital literacy practices in one school in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia • Apply the Four Resources Literacy Framework (Freebody and Luke, 2003) as a mapping tool to investigate the types of resources being encouraged by teachers in their literacy teaching practices around digital texts • Engage teachers in self-reflexive work that would encourage the development of new pedagogical practices to improve the use of digital texts in their literacy classes
Methods • Participants – Four teachers – Classroom release • Data collection – Audio taping of conversations on release days • Data analysis – Discursive analysis using rhizotextual techniques – (Honan 2007)
Overview of a rhizomatic methodology using Deleuze and Guattariâ€&#x;s (1987) thinking about rhizomes. What is a rhizome?
What does an educational methodology look like using rhizomatics?
First, using the figuration of a rhizome involves paying self-conscious attention to the writing of any text. Second, understanding texts as rhizomatic enables the production of an account of the linkages and connections between discursive plateaus operating within a text. Third a rhizotextual analysis involves mapping the connections between these plateaus and those operating within other texts, including the textual representations of stories told by researchers and research participants.
What is a rhizome? • Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus • “One day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian” Foucault, M, "Theatrum Philosophicum", Critique 282, p. 885
What is a rhizome?
Sellers, W. (2006). Review of technology, culture, and socioeconomics: A rhizoanalysis of educational discourses by Patricia OยนRiley, Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (Vol. 3). http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci/article/view/24/45
Sellers, M, (2009) ‘Re(con)ceiving children in curriculum: Mapping (a) milieu(s) of becoming’ Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Queensland (url for eprint)
• Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be‌ A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, social sciences, and social struggles (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7).
Thinking rhizomatically • Poststructural understandings of subjectivities • “the possibility of encompassing the apparently contradictory with ease – even, on occasion, with pleasure” (Davies, 1992, p. 59). • Discourses as linear and/or layered • the “plane of immanence and univocality” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 294) forms and unforms
Writing a rhizome • pay particular attention to the linguistic devices and structures used, • follow lines of flight that allow transgressive blurring of generic boundaries, • write one‟s multiple contradictory selves into the text, • make visible the embodied experiences and their affects on the writer and the text
I was a teacher. I never wanted to be, and now I've stopped, I never will be again, but for several years it took my heart. I entered a place of darkness, a long tunnel of days: retreat from the world (Steedman, 1992, p. 52).
These words of Steedmanâ€&#x;s rattle around my mind I wept when I first read them They echo the darkness of my teaching days When I tried, I struggled to be some person I could not be Teachers tell each other success stories Of children who love them Of ex-students meeting them years later and thanking them When I listen to these stories I remember Standing on a street corner in a busy city Waiting for the lights to change A truck speeding up as it approached the crossing A young man, almost his whole body leaning out the window He screams, he bellows, he yells, so all can hear You bitch, you fucking bitch, yeahhhh, you bitch I have tried to turn this memory into a story that can be shared with other teachers, amusing and touching stories about ex-students But every time I tell it, I remember, I feel the pain, the tears, as I think Yes, this is how they remember me
Understanding texts as rhizomes • Discursive plateaus • Mapping connections between these plateaus • Analysing the provisional linkages that provide these connections
Thesis as Plateaus
Sellers, M, (2009) ‘Re(con)ceiving children in curriculum: Mapping (a) milieu(s) of becoming’ Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Queensland (url for eprint)
Applying rhizoanalytic techniques Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 11).
Rhizotextual analysis • Looking for the connections and linkages between various discursive themes • Map connections between discourses used in different places, e.g. teachers‟ talk; policy documents; professional development texts.
Teachers’ work • Teachers as professional experts • The relationship between policy discourses and teachers‟ classroom practices • Policy discourses [...] organise their own specific rationalities, making particular sets of ideas obvious, common sense and „true‟” (Ball, 2008, p. 5). • The more a practice is mastered, the more fully subjection is achieved. Submission and mastery take place simultaneously, and this paradoxical simultaneity constitutes the ambivalence of subjection (Butler, 1997, p. 116).
Two discursive plateaus • Operational dimension of using new technologies • Emphasis on production of digital texts
English and Literacy Policy contextState level • Queensland Studies Authority – Years 1-10 English Syllabus – cross-curricular priorities – Literacy-the Key to Learning: Framework for Action 2006-2008 – Queensland Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Framework – „essential learning‟ statements about English
English and Literacy Policy contextNational level • Teaching Reading (2005) • ACARA – Australian curriculum, assessment and reporting authority – NAPLAN – Australian curriculum – English (draft)
ICT Policies • Smart Classrooms initiative (http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/) . – Professional development for teachers – Blackboard – ICT Pedagogical licence
Policy context • “the literacy crisis” Snyder, I. (2008). • PISA 2006: In reading literacy in PISA 2006 Australia was outperformed by five countries: Korea, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Canada and New Zealand. • Dusseldorf Skills Forum (2005) alert Australia to the need for a post-industrial workforce • 21st Century jobs -creative thinking, problem solving and personal collaboration (Gee, Hull and Lankshear, 1996),
Technical/Operational Approach • How to operate the language system and how to operate the technology system – handwriting and keyboarding, spelling skills and saving skills
Operational dimension • 3D model – operational, cultural, critical- each alone is necessary but not sufficient • “knowing the technology is the first step in the process of using it effectively” (Sandholtz and Reilly, 2004, p 488) • “Applying ICTs as a tool for learning assists students to become competent, discriminating, creative and productive users of ICTs” (http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/assessment/3160.html).
Operational dimension ANNE: they‟re being asked to type, select different fonts, forward a clip art sort of thing, open and close files to get their work. So it‟s keyboard slash handwriting and they‟re doing keyboard skills to familiarise themselves with where the keys are and the functions and then they have to save that work into their own folder.
LILY: So in order to play the games the children have to be able to turn the computer on, log on as a year 2 student, and navigate the desktop in order to find the game or the internet whatever theyâ€&#x;re doing. If playing the game from the server, the children log into the game using their username and password - ‌ some of the games require to know who you are. And not all of them do that. And if using games on the internet the children must find the game in the favourites section.
• E: Pedagogy is important here – aren’t we talking about the teaching not the tool the computer • Lily: but the tool still comes into it because without the tool you can‟t. • Lily: What I‟m saying is there is a limited amount of time. • Anne: it‟s more time efficient to use a tool you‟re familiar with • Lily: But I think that‟s why I maybe don‟t use it as much or other types – use the fastest most efficient tools to get what you need to get done.
Lily: there‟s a lot of pressure, it comes back to the pressure from out there of well why are you wasting time. You say that you‟ve only got this much time to get all through this stuff why are you wasting time. Why aren‟t you getting all these things done that you say you don‟t have enough time to do. (someone else).. But as a teacher I know teachers don‟t. But Well who does? I feel that, well what we were saying before. government policies and media and parents and I don‟t know why they have such a huge impact on me but they do. I think it‟s because I care, I really care what other people think. And that‟s something that gets me into a lot of trouble sometimes
Operational discourse • Transfer skills from home to school – LILY: So I was overall pretty impressed with what they can do. But I thought it was very different type of technology that they‟re using at home and what we‟re using at school.
• Skills taught over and over again – LILY: I‟ve got year 2s and some of them aren‟t very familiar with using a computer, we did the whole how do I get onto the internet to start with, so we turn the computer on, so can you find the icon ok which one, e, and what does the e stand for? – AUSTIN: I‟ve got a 3\4 class and I could be wrong but definitely I think the Year 4 students are a lot more confident with digital technologies in general so the capacity to extend them and involve them in a lot more of the other areas is possible. I don‟t get the same feeling about the Year 3s.
Operational discourses • Text codebreaking • Standardised testing of skills • Easily identified, measured and assessed
Operational discourses in literacy policy The national English curriculum aims to develop, students’ knowledge of language and literature and to consolidate and expand their literacy skills. More specifically it aims to support students to: • understand how Standard Australian English works in its spoken and written forms and in combination with other non-linguistic forms of communication • learn Standard Australian English to help sustain and advance social cohesion in our linguistically and culturally complex country • respect the varieties of English and their influence on Standard Australian English
• appreciate and enjoy language and develop a sense of its richness and its power to evoke feelings, form and convey ideas, persuade, entertain and argue • understand, interpret, reflect on and create an increasingly broad repertoire of spoken, written and multimodal texts across a growing range of settings • access a broad range of literary texts and develop an informed appreciation of literature • master the written and spoken language forms of schooling and knowledge • develop English skills for lifelong enjoyment and learning.
Operational discourses in NAPLAN
Contradictions • Institutional and societal discourses • Role these discourses play in teachers‟ work • Mastery/submission
And, and, and.... • Provisional linkages between and across discursive plateaus within a text • Mapping, following the lines of flight, between and across this text and other texts that form “circles of convergence” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 22).
Rhizomatic insights (so what?) • Production of plausible (mis)readings of policy texts • Exploring agentic positions for teachers made available in policy texts • We tend to begin by assuming the adjustment of teachers and context to policy but not of policy to context. There is a privileging of the policymaker's reality (Ball, 1994, p. 19). • Positioning teachers as agentic and professional, constituting them (im)plausibly as experts
References Honan, E., (2010) Mapping discourses in teachers‟ talk about using digital texts in classrooms, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31(2) Honan, E & Sellers, M (2008) (E)merging methodologies: putting rhizomes to work, In I. Semetsky (ed) Nomadic education: Variations on a Theme by Deleuze and Guattari. Rotterdam: SensePublishers, pp 111-128 Honan, E (2007), Writing a rhizome: an (im)plausible methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20 (5), 531-546 Honan, E, (2004). „(Im)plausibilities: a rhizotextual analysis of policy texts and teachers‟ work‟, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36 (3), pp267 - 281 Honan, E, (2004). „Teachers as bricoleurs: Producing plausible readings of curriculum documents‟ English Teaching: Practice and Critique September, 2004, Volume 3, Number 2, pp. 99-112. Sellers, M. & Honan, E. (2007) Putting rhizomes to work: (e)merging methodologies. New Zealand Research in Early Childhood Education, 10 (1), pp145-156
Activity • What are the discourses about language present in South African educational policy documents? • What is it important to say about language? What is left unsaid? What is implicit? Taken for granted? • Are there discursive connections or disconnections between and across the policy documents? • Are there contradictions? • What are some (im)plausible readings of these discourses?